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Rice Hybrids Promise Higher Yields
BY EMAN S. MORSI
For a desert country, rice might seem an absurd crop to grow. But the thirsty grain, a staple of the Egyptian diet, is cultivated on 1.8 million feddans in the Delta and parts of Middle Egypt. In fact, the country has become the biggest rice grower in the region, producing 5 million tons of milled rice a year, of which 3.2 million tons is kept for local consumption and the surplus is exported.
Rice is an alluring crop for farmers seeking to maximize return on investment. Harvestable after about five months, one ton of rice fetches up to LE 2,500 on the local market. Its chief competitor, cotton, by contrast, takes seven months to grow with an average net return of LE 1,800 per ton.
“Cotton is very expensive to grow and... needs a lot of hired help and maintenance,” explains Abdel Fattah Dawood, a farmer and land owner in Markaz Abu Hammad, a village in Sharqiya governorate. “In the end, there is nowhere to sell cotton since the government is the only one allowed to buy it directly from farmers and the price they offer doesn’t even cover the cost of planting it... Rice on the other hand yields a lot, doesn’t cost much to grow and has a big market.”
Rice cultivation in the Delta has grown rapidly, replacing cotton as the chief summer crop and putting pressure on finite resources. With arable land and water in short supply, and the population growing at nearly 2 percent a year, rice farmers are seeking innovative ways to produce more rice using less land and water. Agricultural experts are experimenting with new high-yield strains they hope will meet increasing consumption, while at the same time help local farmers derive more profit from their harvest.
Much of this work is being carried out at the Field Crops Research Institute, a branch of the Ministry of Agriculture. According to Abd El-Salam Daraz, the institute’s deputy director and head of its Rice Research Program, 30 years of research has resulted in higher-yielding rice strains with lower water requirements, shorter maturity periods and better resistance to domestic pests. Locally developed hybrid varieties such as SK 2034 and SK 2046 have raised Egypt’s average yield to 9.5 tons per hectare, the highest average in the world according to the UN’s Food & Agriculture Organization (FAO).
Egypt’s translucent short-grain hybrids not only give high yields, they also have a shorter maturation period – only 125 days, compared to 150 days for local inbred varieties. The efficiency allows more rice to be grown on less land, while the early harvest gives farmers the option of either a second harvest, replanting with other crops or leaving the soil to replenish for an extra month.
The Rice Research Program aims to increase cultivation of the new hybrids, which are currently grown on less than one percent of total rice-cultivated land. “One of our strategies is to expand the growing of hybrid varieties since the normal [yield] is 4 tons per feddan, while a hybrid produces 6 tons. So there is a 50 percent increase,” says Daraz.
He stresses, however, that Egyptian rice varieties are not genetically modified. “We are using a traditional or classical breeding. In this method the variety takes at least 12 years to develop. There is no need to use genetic modification methods or genetic engineering in our rice because Egyptian rice has a high grain yield and is resistant to diseases and insects.”
But they still need water. And lots of it. Approximately 10 billion cubic meters, or 18 percent of Egypt’s total water resources, is used in the cultivation of rice. While drought-resistant strains are being developed that require less water, it can take over 1,900 liters of water to grow just one kilogram of rice, about twice as much as wheat.
Yet, in spite of the amount of water used, Daraz makes it clear that Egypt cannot afford to reduce its cultivation of rice. “We must grow rice, especially in the northern Delta near the sea, or else seawater will infiltrate the soil and turn it saline,” he says.
Mohammad Abdel Hamid, a lecturer at Cairo University’s Faculty of Agriculture, concurs. He explains that rice is an essential crop in the northern Delta because it helps “rinse” the land of extra salts and keep encroaching seawater at bay. “River and sea water push each other in opposite directions, so while seawater infiltrates the land, the water table and river water used in irrigating [rice paddies] temporarily push the seawater away,” he explains.
A major thrust of the Rice Research Project is to develop new strains of rice that require less water. According to Daraz, hybrid varieties such as Giza 178 and Sakha 104 consume up to 30 percent less water than traditional ones. “We know that water is a very limiting factor to grow rice,” he says. “We have decreased the water consumption of our rice varieties from 9,000 cubic meters [per feddan] to 6,000 cubic meters... through the development of varieties. Multiply those 3,000 cubic meters by one million feddans and you have saved 3 billion cubic meters of water that you can direct to other new projects.”
“In our varieties, 1 kilogram of rice uses 1.6 cubic meters of water. In the traditional varieties it can reach up to 3 cubic meters per kilogram, so we have increased the water-use efficiency of rice. This is very important and is reflected in the genotype, the variety itself and the duration,” he adds.
Researchers are also seeking to develop saline-tolerant rice varieties suitable for cultivation in the Delta and areas that have been damaged by improper irrigation. “In Egypt more than 25 percent of our land is saline and the [rice] yield of those saline areas is only 2 to 2.5 tons per feddan, but if we increased it by only half a ton per feddan, this could [significantly] increase the productivity of the total area,” Daraz says.
Local researchers have developed robust strains of wheat that can be grown on drained rice paddies, giving farmers an extra harvest while at the same time replenishing the soil. “Wheat uses less water [than rice] so we can alternate between saline-tolerant wheat and rice. This will create a balance,” says Abdel Hamid. “On one hand, it will save a lot of water, and on the other it will [aerate] the land and help keep it fertile.”
But any gain in fertility could quickly be lost if farmers neglect to drain their fields properly. Abdel Hamid warns that the overwhelming majority of rice-cultivated land in Egypt uses a subsurface drainage system that is unsuited for submerged crops and which has resulted in a rising water table, increased root-level salinity and pollution. “Excessive usage of water results in land pollution due to an increase in microbacterial activity that is a result of stagnation. This in turn leads to a higher or lower pH level, which decreases the fertility of the land,” he explains.
The problem is solvable, he insists, but farmers need to change their drainage practices and turn over the soil after the harvest. “We can plant as much rice as we want, but we have to create a good drainage network to keep the land healthy. After planting rice, the land has to be left to dry and plowed to air it in order to control the high microbacterial activity,” he says. “If this is done, rice can be planted alongside many other crops that can produce a good harvest.”
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GOING AGAINST THE GRAIN
Rice is a staple of the Egyptian diet and an important cash crop. Its dual status often pulls it in different directions. On the one hand, Egyptians consume an average of 43 kilograms per capita per year, requiring 3.2 million tons to meet domestic demand; on the other, nearly 2 million tons of rice is exported to countries prepared to a pay a premium price. As the price gap has increased, the incentive to export at the expense of local markets has increased.
In an effort to strike a balance, the Ministry of Trade & Industry recently imposed a LE 200 per ton tariff on rice exports. Trade minister Rachid Mohamed Rachid said the aim of the export tariff is to ensure that adequate supplies of rice will be available in the local market.
But Ahmed El-Naggar, an economist at the Al-Ahram Center for Political & Strategic Studies, sees no indication of a rice shortage in the local market. Instead, he believes the export fee was imposed to discourage the expansion of rice cultivation, which is putting pressure on finite water resources. “Rice export has boomed, leading to an increase in unlicensed planting of rice that has used too much of the water quota allocated to Egypt,” he says. “The tariff is a sort of fine imposed on a crop that gives the highest profit but consumes the most resources.”
A better alternative, he argues, would have been to limit the expansion of rice cultivation a decade ago when it was still manageable. Although the government targets only one million feddans for rice cultivation each year, the fine of LE 600 per feddan for unlicensed cultivation is rarely enforced.
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